Can Rick Perry – the one-time laughingstock who couldn't overcome uncountable gaffes and wildly uneven stump performances to become the Republican nominee in 2012 – be the Republican party's great red hope in 2016? Given a schizophrenic GOP and a political climate where one word – jobs – can trump most every concern, the answer, let me tell you, is ... let's see ... sorry ... oops ... yes! And it's precisely because his policy positions are as wildly unpredictable as his debate performances.

Take immigration, the very issue that helped sink Perry two years ago but has now brought him into the national consciousness with a force that seems to have stunned even Perry himself. He has managed to simultaneously accuse President Obama of causing the humanitarian crisis at the border and pledged to work with the administration to alleviate it, handshakes on the tarmac and all. It's a we'll-see-about-that situation if there ever was one, but at least it shows a modicrum of flexibility.

If Perry can project a relationship with Obama of fruitful contrariness – I don't like you, but I'll deal with you if I have to – he will have hit on an enviable political sweet spot where he can be neither faulted by the hard right for being too much in the president's pocket nor written off as an obstructionist scold with a legislative resumé written largely in the language of "No".

By contrast, the junior Wacko Bird from Texas, Ted Cruz, will be popular only as long as GOP voters are day-dreaming about anybody but Obama in the White House and not making plans to actually accomplish anything. Against the rest of an already crowded 2016 field with a precise preference for the increasingly unpopular Tea Party, their way and the highway, Perry's amalgam may prove strangely appealing: topsy-turvy positions on immigration reform, Obamacare and even prison reform – plus his uncanny inability to turn anything into a conversation about jobs jobs jobs – just might make him the lunatic they're looking for.

Are you not entertained?

Using the legislative process to, you know, enact laws is the traditional advantage that governors have over senators in presidential primaries. Unlike, say, Rand Paul or Marco Rubio, the senior governor from Texas will have a signature issue, after this immigration crisis (Obama said after meeting Perry on Wednesday that "this thing can get done next week"), to answer almost any objection from the Tea Party or establishment moderates: employment. Sure, Texas job growth under his tenure featured prominently in his 2012 campaign, but it did not fail as a selling point so much as fail to trump the clown-car optics and culture-war sniping of the GOP's messy primary season. (It is also best not to look to closely at what kind of jobs he's created.)

Perry is correct about at least the latter. Sentencing reform saved the state $443m the first year it went into effect. About $241m was re-allocated to treatment for addicted offenders and violent crime has now declined by almost 15%. (He's also on solid theological grounds as to the former – though one wonders why he doesn't apply the same two guiding ideals when it comes to the death penalty.)

He's even been able to use – or attempted to use – his radical pragmatism to distance himself from his own troubling comparison of homosexuality and alcoholism: "Whether you're gay or straight you need to be having a job," he said last month in an interview after a public statement reviving an opinion already expressed in his 2008 memoir. He neatly pivoted to the sloganeering demanded by the Republican party's failure to move with the country on social issues:

If you really are going to be the party that's going to talk to everyone, say, 'Listen you may not agree with all of my positions, but giving you and your family and your loved ones the opportunity to get a better life, if we create a climate in this country where you're going to have a job, and a good job, and a good paying job' – if we'll do that, then I think we'll be successful.

He'll have to weather some stumping, of course, and, of all the potential Republican presidential candidates, Perry stands to benefit the most from the shortened primary season and curtailed debate schedule. But it would behoove his naysayers to remember that his bad-to-weird stump performances in 2012 were a seeming anomaly in a retail politics career that once earned him comparisons to Bill Clinton and the endorsement of a liberal state congresswoman "on personal grounds" during his first gubernatorial re-election campaign.

As for the Beltway establishment's obsession with Perry's gaffes, it's almost not worth even asking the question if voters really care. Was George W Bush elected president? Gaffes are a feature of politicians and the electoral process, not a bug. Rick Perry puts on a good show. He may have ditched his cowboy boots for nerd glasses, but he's still as captivating as a rodeo clown.